May 2011

May 31, 2011

Pawn to king 4. Last Tuesday, Bryant Park was a chess fest. Young and old, seasoned and novice players sat head in hands contemplating plastic pieces on the checkered mats. You could hear a pawn drop. Some, like Jay Bonin and Asa Hoffman, were guys I knew back in the day when I was dating my husband Bob Salpeter, a player who would haunt the clubs like the Marshall, a sponsor of this event. For me, a chess widow, this event was a reminder: in the game of chess, the queen has all the power, but the king is the prize.

May 27, 2011

He always shows up, said director Bill Haney, explaining why he bestowed a bald eagle crafted out of recycled moose antler by Iroquois Indian Stan Hill to Robert Kennedy, Jr. “He walks with kings and still has the common touch,” Haney went on praising Kennedy's commitment to the men and women in Appalachia threatened by the raping of coal from the mountains that secure their communities. Kennedy is also a star of Haney's new documentary, The Last Mountain.

May 24, 2011

The Hammerstein Ballroom was packed for the Drama Desk Awards on Monday night. Broadway, off Broadway and off off Broadway casts and crews rubbed more than elbows, just getting to the stage at the announcements of their names. Rushing to receive his outstanding actor award for The Motherf**ker with the Hat, Bobby Cannavale locked Sutton Foster in embrace and hoped that she would be awarded next up. She was.

May 22, 2011

Jazz lost one of its own last week, with the death of Bruce Ricker. Not a player per se, Ricker, a lawyer with a passion for jazz assembled Jay McShann, Count Basie, and Big Joe Turner in Kansas City for a jam session and filmed it. The resulting Last of the Blue Devils (1979) was a unique historic moment, a gathering of musicians, sequenced as an extended riff, as close to spontaneous as the music itself. The much praised film caught the attention of Clint Eastwood and Ricker then helped Eastwood with the scores of several of his films including The Bridges of Madison County and Mystic River, to name two films lauded for their soundtracks. Collaborating with Charlotte Zwerin, Ricker made Straight No Chaser (1988), a documentary about Thelonius Monk, and more recently films about Dave Brubeck, Johnny Mercer, and Tony Bennett.

May 18, 2011

Hello, I'm Buck, says the man in the large brimmed hat, brown leather jacket, brown stitch trimmed white shirt, and red silk tie with horses, completely disarming a guest to the private screening of a documentary film about him on Tuesday night. Buck, the movie, has been circulating the festivals, touted as a crowd-pleaser for its depiction of this man and his unusual way with horses. But what gets you when Buck shakes your hand is the intensity of his blue-eyed gaze.

May 14, 2011

Congratulations to Tony Kushner on the occasion of receiving an honorary doctorate from the City University of New York after a challenge from groups who miss the point of Kushner's impressive contribution to American arts and letters. His views on Middle East politics, however they reflect on what is good for the Jews, should be taken as a point of debate, in the same way that his literature poses thoughtful consideration of what it means to be alive today. Fortunately, his ample gifts are evident in his new play.

May 06, 2011

In a new documentary L'Amour Fou about the iconic Yves St. Laurent, it is hard to tell just what is the object of that besotted state: his work, his substantial art collection, his posh homes in Paris, Marrakech and Normandy, opulently decorated with antiques and woven fabrics. From the perspective of Pierre Berge, St. Laurent's lifelong companion, the film is perhaps an expression of the businessman's own mad devotion to the bespectacled designer who defined fashion in the mid century. In his view, YSL was an aloof workaholic, obsessed with sex and drugs, ambivalent to fame, and mainly depressed. Berge's own place in YSL's life comes off as more business than pleasure. This is not the ebullient Valentino and Giancarlo Giametti.

May 03, 2011

Bananas may be bananas in the revival of John Guare's play The House of Blue Leaves directed by David Cromer at the Walter Kerr Theater, but in the scheme of this wry drama, set in 1965 Sunnyside, Queens, she looks appropriately far gone. As performed by Edie Falco in a fright wig, whose work was just nominated for a Tony for “Best Actress in a Featured Role in a Play,” Bananas pops pills and rolls her bug eyes, taking a cue from Falco's character on Showtime's Nurse Jackie. When you meet her husband Artie Shaughnessy (Ben Stiller) and his girlfriend Bunny (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a scheming couple with ample dreams of fame and limited talent, you can see why they would want Bananas out of the way. Stiller must work hard to be so good at singing mediocre. Enter a gorgeous blond movie star, Corrinna (Alison Pill), the Shaughnessy's son Ronnie (Christopher Abbott in a role originated by a young Ben Stiller), a kid with a few issues, and Artie's successful friend Billy Einhorn (Thomas Sadoski). The nutsy quotient is amplified by the entrance through a barred window of a trio of nuns hoping to see the Pope who is planning a visit. Yes, that Pope. The “little nun” is maybe a head taller than the other two with a hilarious Halley Feiffer in her Broadway debut. She is antic and sour-faced even as she leaves her calling, and reason enough to see this zany play that by end, turns surprisingly poignant.